There are approximately five million Muslims in Thailand (7 percent of the total population), with about 1.8 million in the southernmost provinces bordering on Malaysia. A considerable literature in history, anthropology, political science, international relations, and religious studies has been produced since January 4, 2004, when a violent Muslim insurgency dramatically erupted in the area. At that time over 100 Muslim insurgents raided an arms depot of the Fourth Army Engineers in Narathiwat Province. On January 22, in south Thailand, two Muslim young men on a motorcycle used a long knife to slit the throat of a sixty-four-year-old Buddhist monk, killing him. The monk had just returned from his early morning round of tham bun (alms-collecting extending merit to Buddhist families).

Although martial law was declared by then Prime Minister Thaksin in January 2004, sporadic violence continued for some four months in the southern region until it resulted in a massive daylong siege on April 28, 2004, by the Thai military resulting in the deaths of 112 Muslim teenagers. The Thai military surrounded the Muslim militants, who were armed with machetes and cleavers, in a predawn raid. Some of the young Muslims hid in the historic Krue Se mosque in Pattani, and it was firebombed, killing some thirty-two young assailants who were crying out the takbir (“Allah is great and Muhammad is his Prophet”). Islamic countries in ASEAN, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, criticized the Thai government's handling of this deadly crackdown.

As if things could not get worse, on October 26, some 2,000 Muslim protesters assembled at a police station demanding the release of six Muslims accused of supplying weapons to insurgents. The Thai military arrested 1,300 Muslims, and as the crowd became “irrational,” security forces fired bullets, water from water cannons, and tear gas into the crowd; six protesters were killed. After the arrested Muslims were packed into army trucks headed for prison, seventy-eight prisoners suffocated to death. Facing further international outrage and criticism, Thaksin declared that the Muslims were weak from Ramadan fasting and that was the reason they had suffocated. Since 2004 there have been over 5,000 deaths and at least 8,000 related injuries for both Buddhists and Muslims in the largest insurgency outside of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dynamic Diversity in Southern Thailand is a collection of papers from a conference titled “Experiencing Southern Thailand: Current Social Transformations from People's Perspectives” cosponsored by the Pattani campus of Prince of Songkla University and the Anthropology Department at Harvard University in June 2002. Although the volume is uneven in quality and production, many of the papers are prescient regarding 2004 with reflections on ethnicity and problems that afflict south Thailand. Omar Farouk Bajunid begins the volume with a description of the diversity of Islam and the polymorphous character of nationalism in Thailand. Bajunid indicates that problems of poverty and high unemployment, drug addiction, crime, and other social problems have created conditions for violence and the reemergence of separatist and even new jihadist developments.

Duncan McCargo's essay on southern Thai politics provides a description of pre-2004 factors that would become important in generating the present violent condition. He notes that the Thai secular education system promoted by the government has been the bane of the Muslims in the south where the several hundred pondok are central to their ethno-religious identity. After questioning some of the reified “cultural generalizations” that have been promoted as explanations of southern Thai behavior, McCargo concludes the essay by suggesting that local elites created a proto-civil society that inhibited the emergence of chao pho or godfather bosses as in other regions of Thailand.

Piya Kittaworn et al. draw on the local voices in south Thailand expressing dissatisfaction with the top-down, unsustainable economic developments and ecological damage, such as the depletion of marine resources, the destruction of wetlands and rice fields, inadequate land surveys that disrupt communities when forest conservation projects are designed, and other problems. The essay ends with proposals to stop these development projects and enable local people with indigenous wisdom and knowledge, including pondok religious education, to manage their own communities for their benefit.

Wattana Sugunnasil's study of how local Buddhist villagers in a southern community in Narathiwat adopted the flow of modern consumer goods into their communities is insightful. Wattana describes how villagers adopted consumer goods, such as Japanese motorcycles and televisions, that had both negative and positive consequences. New forms of wage labor were not having a disruptive effect on the family farms, and although new consumer goods did lead to competition in status, it did not completely dismantle morality and patterns of altruism in these communities.

Phil King discusses the failure of the Indonesian-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle (IMT-GT), established in 1993 to develop an integrated socioeconomic and industrialization development program for the southern Thai provinces, northeastern Malaysia, and the Indonesian provinces of Aceh and Sumatra. However, with the economic meltdown of 1997, the resistance of some NGO networks to the industrialization project, and the eventual 2001 election of Thaksin and his “One Tambon, One Product” small-scale development scheme, the IMT-GT resulted in more conflict than social capital.

Paul Dowsey-Magog penetrates the meaning of a traditional form of shadow-puppet theatre in south Thailand called nang talung, which has been transformed by adding contemporary popular music and new stories to appeal to a young generation. He describes how this revitalized “invented tradition” enables new anti-hegemonic forms of resistance to local corrupt kamnan (village headmen) or Chinese or Western investors, but also has to adapt to the audience by avoiding sensitive political issues.

Marlene Guelden discusses the well-known southern tradition of manora or nora that involves spirit-mediums who become possessed by spirits during public dance performances. Although this nora tradition was initially associated with ordained Theravada monks, it has currently become a means for women to gain status and spiritual authority outside of a patriarchal domain.

A study of Chinese festivals called “Vegetarian Festivals” in Hat Yai in Songkla Province was conducted by Javon Maud in 2001. He discusses two different types of the festivals. One is based on folk-Taoist traditions with a spectacular parade of Nine Emperor deities on palanquins along with spirit mediums exhibiting various self-mutilation practices, piercings, and firecrackers. The other festival is a sedate and quiet syncretic ritual associated with a Mahayana Buddhist temple emphasizing a ritual vegetarian meal. These festivals represent the more assertive Chinese-ness that has developed in south Thailand since the 1980s, coinciding with the transnational global connections with the PRC, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Jawanit Kittitornkool conducted a study of two villages to assess the status of women in south Thailand. Women have increasingly become involved in economic development projects while drawing upon their local kin networks for support. Senior women in their late phases of the family cycle have more opportunity, resources, and social capital to become involved in development projects, which has resulted in social progress.

Theodore Mayer provides ethnographic insights into a Dhamma Walk around Lake Songkhla that he followed from 1995 to 2003. The Dhamma Walk is an aspect of an international “socially engaged Buddhism” that highlights the environmental problems and problems of violence in this southern region. The Dhamma Walk establishes a social space that enhances both contemplation and worldly action as espoused by the famed Thai Buddhist reformer Buddhadasa Bhikku.

Suleemarn Wongsuphap discusses the Baba Chinese diaspora community of Phuket who have developed their transnational connections and supportive kinship, marriage, and patronage networks to become successful in tin mining and international trade. She demonstrates how both women and men built the functioning relational networks to sustain their community.

In the final chapter, Irving Chan Johnson examines the complexities of identity among the Thai Buddhists in Kelantan in the border region. Although these Thai in Kelantan pledge loyalty to Malaysia, subjectively they perceive themselves as ethnically Thai and associate with the monarchy and Buddhism. Traveling back and forth along this porous border, these Thai Kelantanese tend to view Thailand in an ambivalent moral framework as they encounter prostitution, AIDS, the corruption of some Buddhist monks, and other social problems.

Michael Montesano and Patrick Jory edited an excellent collection of papers from a workshop at Walailak University in Nakhon Sri Thammarat after the 2004 violence erupted, resulting in Thai South and Malay North: Ethnic Interactions on a Plural Peninsula. Anthony Reid provides the historical framework for understanding identity issues by assessing the source documents from Thailand, Malaysia, China, and the Europeans in the region. The “Plural Peninsula” consisted of hunter-gatherers, such as the Semang and Senoi; the orang laut or sea gypsies; a diverse Karen and Mon populace; early portage sites, such as Penang, with Theravada and Muslim networks; the Portuguese; the Protestant Dutch; the French Catholics; and the later cosmopolitan ports of Mergui and Tenasserim with Siamese, Malays, Chinese, Persians, Indians, and Europeans. With nineteenth-century colonialism, many of these plural commercial communities would become peripheral backwaters.

Chuleeporn Virunha analyzes, interprets, and reinterprets the historiography of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in the southern peninsula to determine issues of local identity within the Thai and Malay mandalas or galactic polities. The trade-centered, loosely organized state based in Melaka and Johor contrasts with the agriculturally based Thai polity based in Ayuthaya and later Bangkok. Chuleeporn argues that despite the development of Islamic and Buddhist orientations, local ethnic identities did not crystalize into separate enclaves during the early periods.

Davisakd Puaksom examines the political dynamics of Patani historiography by Thai and Malay historians who attempt to demonstrate the historical legitimacy for claims over sovereignty in the contested southern region. Davisakd describes how the political sovereignty of these premodern Southeast Asian states fluctuated depending on whether local rajas recognized the political legitimacy radiating from the centers of the mandalas. The Thai and Malay historical sources clearly demonstrate that there were times when Patani had more autonomy or became more dependent on Ayuthaya and later Bangkok authorities.

Thanet Aphornsuvan describes the post-1932 civilian-led democratic tendencies and the role of Bangkok-based Chaem Phromyong and Pattani-based Haji Sulong as Islamic reformists who provided hope for Malay Muslims in their fraught relationship with Bangkok. Haji Sulong had spent twenty years in Mecca and pioneered the development of modern Islamic education in the south. Chaem Phromyong had been an accomplice in the civilian coup and was appointed as the first chularatchamontri, Islamic advisor to the government. The nationalistic and forced assimilation policies of the Phibun regime in the 1930s and 40s dashed Malay Muslim aspirations, especially with the arrest and disappearance of Haji Sulong. A key factor in distinguishing politics in the south compared with other Thai regions was the open expression of dissent within the public spaces of the Muslim pondoks and masjids, which distressed Thai authorities.

James Ockey analyzes the election results in south Thailand from the 1930s through 2005 after the insurgency to assess the political integration of Muslims. Strong correlations were found between democratic developments for Muslims in the south and enhanced political integration. However, Ockey indicates that the current insurgency tends to undermine both democratic tendencies, resulting in more ethno-religious separatism and less cooperation.

Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian focuses on the Siamese Muslims (or Sam Sams) of Satun and Songkhla who maintained the Thai language but had converted to Islam and did not encounter the problems of forced assimilation and Thai nationalism in the same way that the Malay Muslims did. Kobkua argues that since the 1990s globalization, the expanding Thai economy, and the rise of the middle class (especially the Sino-Thai) have created more cosmopolitan forms of identity, except for most Malay Muslims in the south.

In a perceptive analysis of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP—later the Communist Party of Malaysia, CPM) and its settlement in south Thailand, Karl Hack presents the global impact stemming from Beijing, the British, and the U.S. Cold War alliance with Bangkok in the region. In the early 1950s, some semblance of law and order developed in south Thailand as the MCP repressed banditry and achieved a modus vivendi with Thai authorities and even a “study the Thai language campaign.” The Cultural Revolution in the PRC stimulated more CPM raids and a Second Malayan Emergency that lasted into the 1970s. Ironically, despite the eventual demise of the CPM and Maoism, six villages have been established for the former CPM fighters receiving development assistance from Thai authorities and the royal family.

Wong Yee Tuan, Teo Kok Seong, and Michael Montesano examine the role of the Chinese in south Thailand. Wong details the regional networks produced through intermarriage and fictive-kin relationships of the five dominant Chinese families based in Penang that had an influence on south Thailand. These five wealthy Hokkien families established relationships with the Siamese (Sino-Thai) and Indo-Malayan elites, as well as Hakka families, to exert control over trade, tin mining, and revenue farming in south Thailand. Teo focuses on the linguistic and cultural aspects of the Kelantan Peranakan Chinese, some of whom migrated from Patani and maintain marital ties and close relationships with southern Thais. These rural-based Peranakan Chinese speak a nonstandard dialect of Hokkien; however, most of their communication is in a Kelantan Malay and Kelantan Thai dialect. They adhere to a syncretic Theravada Buddhist tradition that includes Taoist and Confucianist beliefs as well as Malay animistic beliefs and practices. Although familiar with Islamic beliefs, they rarely convert to Islam. Montesano's detailed history of rubber-industry capitalism and education promoted by the Chinese community in Trang is rich. He describes intraethnic and interethnic trends along with Thai nationalistic developments that have influenced the peninsular Chinese.

Alexander Horstmann describes the Buddhist and Islamic pilgrimages that solidify ethno-religious identity in south Thailand. The Chinese enjoy packaged weekend pilgrimages to Thai Buddhist monuments for nostalgic reasons, the Thai pilgrimages celebrate kingship and national identity, and the Muslim Haj has become part of a mass religious consumer culture that connects Muslims with global Islam.

Patrick Jory discusses the legends of a Theravada monk, Luang Pho Thuat, who became a symbol of Thai authoritative control over the southern provinces. Luang Pho Thuat became a revered monk who performed miracles in Ayutthaya and was associated with a wat in Pattani that produced amulets worn by popular celebrities, military personnel, and other notables. Histories of the iconic monk were used to promote the Buddhist origins of Pattani and other Malay areas.

Irving Chan Johnson extends his analysis of the Thai Buddhist Kelantanese to demonstrate how the narratives of miracle stories regarding sacred healing powers of various monks or mae chii travel throughout and beyond this porous border region. Johnson argues that these traveling narratives have solidified identities among the Thai Kelantanese and Chinese patrons. Simultaneously, Malay Muslim identities in Kelantan have become more primordial with Islamic fundamentalist trends.

In a sentimental afterword, Suthiwong Phongphaibun longs for a new cultural integration of the peoples of the south based on former ancient rituals and practices.

Zachary Abuza's Conspiracy of Silence attempts to explain the Muslim insurgency in south Thailand. As expected within the “terrorism literature” produced by the United States Institute of Peace, Abuza sets forth a bullet-point narrative style moving from one episode to another to present the “factual” details that have led to the conflict. He questions the premises that the conflict has any economic roots in criminal activities, cross-border trafficking, ethnic secessionism, or territorial control. Abuza asserts that the insurgency involves an Islamic radical jihadist campaign with Wahhabist and Salafist leanings that is linked with Jemaah Islamiya (JI) and al Qaeda networks. The purpose of the book is to explain the causes of the sudden increase in violence, investigate the groups coordinating the conflict (with no single group taking responsibility, hence the title of the book), identify the demands of the groups, and assess the consequences of governmental actions and the impact of the insurgency for the region.

Abuza provides a brief summary of the history of the conflict back to the Buddhist and then Islamic kingdom of Patani and the extension of the Thai state into the region, Thai-British colonial rivalry, and the forced assimilation and excessive nationalistic policies of the Phibul regime of the 1930s and 40s that banned the use of the Malay language and Islamic laws in the southern region, which exacerbated ethnic and religious conflict. With the continued resettlement of Thai Buddhists in the region, the arrest and “disappearance” of Haji Sulong, and the repressive policies of Sarit Thanarat in the 1950s and 1960s, Abuza concludes that secessionist movements were bound to arise. He describes the different secessionist groups, including the most well-known, the Pattani United Liberation Organization with its armed wing, the Pattani United Liberation Army. Though he draws on some of the basic sources for the historical treatment of this region and the secessionist movements, such as Wan Kadir Che Man, Abuza overlooks some important sources, such as the seminal book of Surin PitsuwanFootnote ¹ (who is mistakenly identified as a Pattani Muslim; he is from Nakhon Sri Thammarat) and the considerable empirical data amassed by the American political scientist Ladd Thomas.Footnote ²

Abuza suggests that the various secessionist movements failed because of Thai-Malaysian border and security control efforts, the general lack of Malaysian support for their Malay brethren in the Thai region, the absence of heavy military repression and the assimilation and collaboration of some Muslim leaders, rapid socioeconomic development, government reform of the Islamic educational curriculum, the vague political platforms and factionalism of the movements, the integration of Muslims into the national political process, negligible financial support from outsider Islamic states, and general amnesty grants to the separatists. Though some of these points would be contested by the Muslim populace, by 1998 the secessionist movements came to a standstill. Abuza closes the chapter on history by discussing lingering grievances of the Muslims, such as resentment towards Thai government education and language policies that direct forced assimilation strategies; the lack of punishment in cases of military and police abuse; the corrosive influence of secularism blamed for increases in gambling, prostitution, drugs, and immorality; and the distrust of their communities by Thai Buddhists.

Chapter 2 focuses on how the Thaksin government after 2001 initially neglected the intelligence developed regarding al Qaeda and JI active in Thailand. Abuza produces a laundry list of the number of JI and al Qaeda members and funding sources based in Thailand as well as the arrest of Riduan Ismudin, known as Hambali, who was linked to the Bali bombing of 2002. He claims that the president of Yala Islamic College, Ismail Lutfi Japagiya, is a leading Saudi-sponsored Wahhabite and Salafist cleric who was connected with JI and encouraged it to support the insurgency in the south. However, from a book entitled Islam, Education, and Reform in Southern Thailand: Tradition and Transformation by Joseph Liow (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009) published the same year as Abuza's book, one gains a very different portrait of Lutfi. Liow interviewed Lutfi extensively and examined his writings carefully. Although Lutfi shares some of the Wahhabi conceptions, such as viewing Sufism as deviant, he is aligned with the Islamic reformist movements in Thailand that want to introduce innovative educational techniques and, in contrast to many Wahhabis and Salafists, promotes religious pluralism among Muslims and non-Muslims.

Abuza catalogues and tabulates the violent episodes in the southern provinces. He explores how the intermittent and episodic Muslim violence moved from typical low-tech pre-2004 bombings to more sophisticated IED explosives and beheadings that were developed in Iraq. In chapter 4, he asserts that two main organizations were behind the violence: Gerakan Mujahideen Islamiya Pattani, with a handful of veterans from Afghanistan training camps, and Barisan Revolusi Nasional-Congress, a pondok-based cellular organization led by what Abuza refers to as radical clerics. He emphasizes that the insurgency has become more of a coordinated (but silent) Islamic jihadist movement based on Internet connections, globalization, and educational opportunities in the pondoks. Abuza discusses whether transnational terrorist networks are involved in the insurgency. Although he concludes that there was no evidence that transnational networks were involved in the south, he alludes to social connections between Ismail Lutfi and Hambali, without providing any source for this “fact.”

The final chapter discusses the impact of the insurgency on south Thailand, the region, and the international arena. Locally, Abuza notes the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Thai Buddhists, the targeting of teachers and the decline of educational standards, and the retardation of both economic development and health care. Strained relations between Thailand and Malaysia (especially within the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party-dominated Kelantan area), who maintain sympathies and strong ties with their Islamic brethren involved in the insurgency, and concerns of ASEAN regarding the influence of JI in the area are regional issues. Abuza terminates the book by claiming that the United States needs to be concerned about how al Qaeda has morphed into an ideology that may draw more jihadists into the southern insurgency.

Michael Jerryson's Buddhist Fury assesses the role of the Buddhist monastic communities in the provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat, and Yala, the major regions of the insurgency. His extensive ethnographic research develops an understanding of how the Buddhist monks both influence and were influenced by the violence surrounding their communities, a neglected area of research. However, Jerryson casts a wider net in order to debunk some misconceptions of the Buddhist tradition as a platonic, idealized form based on a normative nonviolent image in contrast to the lived tradition. In his introduction, Jerryson provides a brief review of the historical and political conditions that have led to the insurgency in this border region, leading to the current troubles. Although Jerryson takes pains to emphasize that religion itself (Buddhism or Islam) does not create the violence, he indicates that the Malay Muslim separatists will at times draw on a jihadist discourse and international aid to support their cause. In addition, he indicates that the Malay Muslims target not only the Buddhists, but also moderate members of their own communities who are believed to be working for the Thai state.

In chapter 1 Jerryson discusses the historiographical components of this ethno-religious struggle. By reviewing the educational curriculum in the southern region, Jerryson describes how the Thai state promulgates a “master narrative” that is focused on how the monarchy with a Buddhist orientation established a progressive nation-state that had incorporated the Malay provinces for centuries, with no mention of the Islamic kingdom of Patani. As in all nation-states, the master narrative is intended to produce an identity as well as allegiance and loyalty to the Thai state through a selective historiography that muted any Islamic or Malay past. However, counter-narratives developed among both Thai Buddhists and Malay Muslims. The Thai Buddhist counter-narrative emphasized the significance of the early Buddhist kingdoms of Langkasuka and Śrivijaya and southern Thai Buddhism traditions. The counter-narrative for Malay Muslims stressed the importance of the Patani Islamic kingdom and the overall Islamization of the adjacent regions of Southeast Asia. He argues that the prevalence of the “master narrative” causes most contemporary Thai journalists to portray the current violence as a recent random and chaotic phenomenon without any historical context.

The chapter on “representations” uses Bourdieu's notions of symbolic capital to elucidate how the Buddhist monks in the southern arena embody both sacral symbols and “representations of the imagined solidarity, the nation” (p. 50). Jerryson analyzes how the Buddhist monks became the catalyst of insurgent violence based on three contingent factors: a space of conflict, a politicized Buddhist representation, and an assault on that representation. The Muslim attacks on the embodiment of the Thai state and sacral power invoke an emotional rage indicated in a quote from a Thai general in the Bangkok Post: “Now that the bandits have gone berserk, our men must become crazed too to fight them” (p. 53). Jerryson notes that a series of sex and drug scandals diminished the sacral image of Thai monks in the 1980s and 1990s, but Thai authorities responded by establishing police monks (tamrūat phra) in order to monitor monastic practices. Following the attacks on the monks in southern Thailand, Queen Sirikit and Thai authorities sponsored a Volunteer Monk Program to recruit monks to go to this conflict region, which accentuated their political dimension.

Chapters 3 and 4 provide specific details of the change in Buddhist practices and the militarization of the wat in this conflict region. Jerryson begins with an interview with an abbot based in a categorized dangerous red zone in the south. He asks the abbot, “What are the monk's duties during the violence in the southern border provinces?” He replied simply, “Monks should have guns to protect themselves” (p. 82). With the heightened danger, the environment of the wat has changed, many with the Thai military in residence, or the military accompanying the monks in their daily alms-gathering. And in a reversal of Theravada Buddhist practices, out of safety concerns, the monks await the laity within the wat to collect their merit-making food offerings. Chapter 4 provides a nuanced description of how some of the Buddhist monks became military monks (thahān phra) and how the wat have become militarized. Though since 1902 monks have been exempted from military service, beginning in 2002 a covert military unit directed Buddhist soldiers to become ordained; it was rumored to be sponsored by the queen. The militarization of the monks and wat is interlinked with the development of clandestine Buddhist militias, such as Queen Sirikit's Village Protection Volunteer Project (Or Ror Bor). Jerryson describes how, prior to the 2004 violence, Malay Muslims often attended the wat for various communal activities, celebrations, and study, but now the emotional rage stemming from the conflict divides these ethno-religious communities.

The chapter “Identity” discusses how both Malay Muslim and Thai Buddhist identities have become racialized through Thai mainstream discourse during various historical and political eras. In Thailand racial identity is based on conceptions of skin color as well as ethnic and religious identity. Jerryson discusses how the concept of khaek that was loosely applied to “guests” or “strangers” became a derogatory and pejorative racial classifier based on skin color and images of poverty for Malay Muslims and appears to be associated with early Thai Buddhist renderings of demons and humans associated with Māra, the antagonist of the Buddha during his enlightenment.Footnote ³ As in other areas of the world, such as the former Yugoslavia or Northern Ireland, conflict and violence has resulted in more demarcated, primordialized, and essentialized identities among Malay Muslims and Thai Buddhists that continue to inhibit ethno-religious cooperation.

Another current ethnographic project by New Zealander Christopher Joll focuses on the urban Malay community of Cabetigo within Pattani. Joll lived and worked in Pattani for approximately ten years with his Thai-born wife and children. He learned to speak both Thai and Malay with fluency to produce a highly detailed ethnography. Joll was intrigued with how the Muslims would refer to merit-making with the Thai Buddhist idiom tham bun and he explores the interpretation of this phrase by employing the state-of-the-art orientation within the anthropology of Islam that focuses on both textual analysis and practices. Other anthropologists, such as Burr and Scupin, have viewed tham bun practices among the Muslim minority in Thailand as a syncretic influence within the Buddhist milieu. Joll provides a nuanced exegesis of the Malay Muslim usages and interpretations of these tham bun practices that serve to question these earlier views. Although this study does not directly deal with the insurgency in the south, it does illuminate some of the Muslim cultural ideals and practices within the region.

In order to frame his analysis of merit-making in Cabetigo, Joll provides a history of this southern area and the influences of the Indic Sanskrit cosmopolis, followed by the expansion of Islam through Indian and Middle Eastern creole ambassadors, and then Thai colonial developments up to the time of the 2004 insurgency. In addition, he describes the emergence of Wahhabi, Salafi, and Tablighi movements that spread and became incorporated in the beliefs, practices, education, and culture, which led to variations of local Islamic practices within south Thailand and Cabetigo.

Chapter 3 discusses the tremendous ethnic and linguistic diversity in Cabetigo. Although most of the urban residents of Cabetigo recognize their historical ethnic Malay roots, increasing numbers of these bilingual speakers use a Malay-inflected Thai and Thai-inflected Pattani Malay, and central Thai refer to themselves as “Thai Muslims.” However, they also draw upon Arabic terms that assist in comprehending their religious convictions.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 investigate the usages of tham bun among the Muslims and multiple interpretations of merit-making for various types of religious activities. Joll argues that tham bun is not just a result of syncretism, but rather the adoption of a religious idiom that involves a “search for equivalence.” He takes this phrase from religious studies scholar Tony Stewart, who analyzed how Islamic concepts were accepted and transformed by Bengali Muslims who used a Sanskrit lexicon, but did not confuse Islam and Hinduism. Likewise, when Joll probed the meanings of tham bun used by Cabetigo Muslims, he found that they deployed concepts from both Arabic and Malay to distinguish their merit-making from Buddhist notions. He admits that he may not have discovered this search for equivalence if his informants had been monolingual Thai speakers. Describing the varying interpretations of merit-generation through reading and reciting the Qur'an, performances of compulsory salat, and other supererogatory prayers, Joll affords the reader a glimpse into the subjective dimensions of his project. Although most agree that these actions are governed by the appropriate niat (silent or audible intentions), there are very different elicited views of merit-production. For example, some of the Cabetigo Muslims accepted the reading of the Qur'an for the dead by ritual specialists, whereas others believed it had to be a child or another relative of the deceased. Prayers offered at older mosques compared to those offered at Pattani's central mosque (funded by a non-Muslim Thai government) were deemed more meritorious by some. Divergent and sometimes even contradictory or ambiguous views are expressed regarding merit-making through acts of charity for the living and the dead, as well as a range of ritual complexes involving food and prayer, such as funeral feasts; mawlid feasts (commemoration of the Prophet Muhammad's birth); house-warming feasts; and general tham bun feasts for rites of passage, such as naming ceremonies seven days after birth, circumcision, or a child's first complete reading of the Qur'an.

Chapter 7 focuses on Ramadan and the haj pilgrimage as merit-making possibilities for these Cabetigo Muslims. Although merit from wajib (Arabic, obligatory) practices appears to be ontologically superior to other supererogatory equivalents, calculating merit from these activities is also subject to varying interpretations. As one of Joll's haji informants remarks, “If I pray at home, I get one mark of merit. If I pray in a mosque, I get 27 marks of merit. If I pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, I get 25,000 marks of merit. If I pray in Medina, I get 50,000 marks of merit. If I pray in Mecca, I receive 100,000 marks of merit!” (p. 177). Others mentioned that only Allah ultimately knows the calculation of the merit that will be bestowed upon the individual depending on the internal motivations of the pilgrim. A constant refrain among many of the Cabetigo Muslims regarding merit-making is that some individuals may have questionable motivations for their ritual practices, such as performing the haj as a means of pursuing lucrative contracts.

Chapter 8 considers the rationales that motivate these Cabetigo Muslims to generate, accumulate, and transfer merit. Joll suggests that there exists an “economy of merit” within this Muslim urban community resembling Buddhist conceptions of spiritual insurance, cosmic capital, or currency, like other conventional economic activities. However, Joll argues that the rationales expressed in this Muslim economy of merit are thoroughly based on Islamic cosmologies and practices.

A lesson relearned from Joll's research since the critiques of Geertz's research in Indonesia is that the typologies of traditionalist, reformist, and revivalist need to be understood as generalized ideal types rather than as reflecting empirical realities. The author continually reminds the reader that there is a lack of consensus regarding merit-making beliefs and practices among these Muslims. Yet, Joll states in his conclusive chapter that “this study has argued that the merit-making rationales that motivate Muslims in Cabetigo to make merit correspond to deeply held beliefs about obligations to Allah” (p. 208). Through this thick description analysis, Joll confronts the ethnographer's inevitable dilemma and challenge of how one ought to measure and represent these subjective cultural beliefs carried by individuals within a community.